The Downside of HTML5 OS

In the coming months, we will be witnessing several launches of mobile operating systems on the market, one of the significant ones that strikes my mind, is the Firefox OS.

Firefox OS is designed based on HTML5 platform, many features are experimental, but this is the first innovative approach to utilize web technology for mobile computing.

Scope of JavaScript

At the end of the day, Javascript is and remains a simple scripting language, it certainly offers several interesting features and functionality, but in reality, we can not compare it to C or C ++. Javascript is obviously not equipped to handle an Operating system.

With Javascript not being a significantly powerful language and its design not being compatible with the hardware, eventually the Operating System will encounter several hardware and software limitations.

Application Vulnerability

Applications are only web applications, representing a source of vulnerability for the developed application. The web version of a certain application will be supporting either a CSS or JS and anyone can easily delve into the unprotected code. Obviously, the developers are going to find it attractive.

For example a secure payment gateway application, this would be the worst nightmare for a developer, because HTML5 does not offer any type of file encryption, which makes it impossible to hide the content. Cracked applications will be more common.

Hardware vs. Software Limitations

The present day devices underwent several improvements in terms of both software and hardware,and to an extent it is considerably complex to control every feature equipped in the hardware. Due to this specific reason, a lot of processing power is required.

The processing power equipped with Firefox OS, would be nowhere near the required processing usage. I find it merely impossible, for Firefox OS to handle high-end configuration CPUs, since it cannot manage resources efficiently. So it may very well be confined to low-end computers itself.

Evolution of Operating System

There would be yearly updates in HTML5 standards, which renders Firefox to update the OS, to keep up with the latest standards and feature sets. Due to the fact that FireFox OS is based on an open-source platform, several modified versions would emerge.

One day, there would several versions (rather, fragmentation of versions) with different feature-set, so it would make it cluttered and difficult to manage, because selecting a particular version would become difficult.